Histories of politics in India frequently distinguish between the domains of elite and of popular or subaltern politics. The latter is typically expressed in the idiom of the fragment and identified with the particular rather than with the universal. This talk engages with the popular politics of the anti-indenture movement in India to raise the following questions: what happens when popular politics makes a claim to the universal? What does such an “impossible” politics suggest about the nature of the political itself?

Co-sponsored by:
South Asia NYU,
Department of History at NYU,
The Center for International History at Columbia University

The Enclosure of Movement: How Travelers, Officials and Jurists Negotiated Freedom of Movement in the Old Reich

Tuesday, April 28, 4:15-6pm

Fayerweather 411

With Discussant Carl Wennerlind, Barnard

In the fragmented political landscape of early modern Germany, control over moving goods and people was a permanent object of contention between travelers and more than three hundred competing polities. Such conflicts were often framed as matters of “conduct”, a term denoting the sovereign right to escort travelers and to levy customs duties on passing goods and people. Although only certain forms of movement were subject to conduct restrictions, public officials constituted a considerable obstacle for the unhampered movement on the roads and rivers traversing the patchwork empire. Accordingly, attempts at “monopolizing the legitimate means of movement” (John Torpey) clashed at more or less open forms of resistance from the side of those to be controlled. Drawing on the physical, symbolic and intellectual conflicts occasioned in this context, the talk explores the fundamentally controversial nature of these polities’ grasp on human mobility. Confronted with fragmented, multi-layered forms of territoriality, double-edged claims of protection and ubiquitous appeals to free movement, we are called to reflect on the border through the eyes of a past that knew restricted mobility as an all-pervasive but much-disputed principle of socio-spatial organization.

Abstract: In the first half of the twentieth century, political emigres and exiles from India found themselves in a position to become the voice of a colonised and oppressed country before an audience comprising often sympathetic, if not always well-informed, citizens of various countries of the world in which they found themselves. The ways in which they found this voice had much to do with their ability to reframe the problem of India in terms intelligible to these audiences. In so doing, they also embarked on a process of self-education and ideational translation that was transformative of the ways of conceptualising India in the world, and the world for India. The various framings of India, sometimes by the same person for different audiences, is revealing of the ways in which existing and emerging languages of legitimation were mobilised, and affected the reframing of ‘India’ both at home and away from India, by those identified with India as a national entity as well as those foreign to it. The ways in which peripheral subjects speaking from and to the centres of world power were crucial elements in conceptualising the periphery for its own subjects at home is an important aspect of the mobilisation and movement of diverse ideas in the first half of the twentieth century. How did the persons move back and forth? How did this movement of ideas work? How were these transmitted? These questions take us past the themes of the limited or constrained agency of the native informant, towards a more dynamic model of moving ideas.

As part of the 1949 UNESCO Human Rights Exhibition seminar series, the Institute for the Study of Human Rights presents

Human Rights on the World Stage

A Talk by Sharon Sliwinski, Associate Professor of Information and Media Studies, University of Western Ontario

With Commentary by Rosalyn Deutsche, Adjunct Professor of Art History, Barnard College

Date and time: Monday 9 December 2013 at 6.15pm

Location: 602 Hamilton, Columbia University

The 1949 UNESCO Human Rights Exhibition operated both as cultural document and as educational implement. Sharon Sliwinski proposes to highlight some of the tensions involved in transposing human rights into these terms. What will be under particular scrutiny are the fantasies that drive such educational campaigns, namely, that proper knowledge will bring about social progress. Professor Sliwinski will address the historical lineage of this fantasy, as well as its persistence in the present in form of “sites of conscience.”

This is the third event in a seminar series revolving around the largely unknown 1949 UNESCO Human Rights Exhibition – the first international event that sought to visually represent the history, meaning and content of the rights set out in the UDHR. The series will lead up to a new display of the exhibition archive at Columbia’s Buell Hall Gallery in April 2014. For more information, visit www.exhibithumanrights.org.

This seminar series is made possible with the support of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, the Center for International History, and the Center for Human Rights Documentation and Research.

Location: Second Floor Common Room, Heyman Center for the Humanities, Columbia University (see directions here)

In a conversation with Thomas Keenan we will explore the historical and contemporary visual culture of human rights by drawing comparisons between UNESCO’s Human Rights exhibition from 1949 and the Family of Man exhibition from 1955. Questions will be raised about the role of images in giving meaning to the idea of human rights, be they linked to triumphant narratives, depictions of suffering, or acting as evidence.

This is the second event in a seminar series revolving around the largely unknown 1949 UNESCO Human Rights Exhibition – the first international event that sought to visually represent the history, meaning and content of the rights set out in the UDHR. The series will lead up to a new display of the exhibition archive at Columbia’s Buell Hall Gallery in April 2014. For more information, visit www.exhibithumanrights.org.

This seminar series is made possible with the support of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, the Center for International History, and the Center for Human Rights Documentation and Research.

The event is free and open to the public with limited seating offered.

If you cannot join us on October 30th for the conversation with Judith Butler and Cornel West titled, Palestine and the Public Intellectual: Honoring Edward Said, we invite you to watch the event on live-stream. We will begin at 7:15PM (Eastern). Please follow the link to tune-in:

Unfortunately, this event has been fully booked and registration is closed.

For those that have registered, please remember that registration does NOT guarantee entrance to the event and seating is on a first-come, first-seated basis.

We hope that you tune-in.

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Judith Butler and Cornel West, in Conversation
Palestine and the Public Intellectual: Honoring Edward Said

On the Tenth Anniversary of Edward Said’s passing, renowned scholars Judith Butler and Cornell West will discuss what it means to be a public intellectual and Edward Said’s impact on the academic discourse of Palestine.

IntroductionLila Abu Lughod, Director of the Middle East Institute and Professor of Anthropology & Gender Studies, Columbia University

ModeratorJames Schamus, Professor of Professional Practice, School of the Arts, Columbia University

Judith Butler is a leading scholar in the fields of ethics, political philosophy, feminist philosophy and queer theory. Visiting Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University and Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program for Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. Butler is the recipient of the Mellon Award for Distinguished Scholarship in the Humanities. Author of many influential books from Gender Trouble to Precarious Lives, her most recent book is Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism. She is active in gender and sexual politics and human rights, anti-war politics, and a board member of Jewish Voice for Peace.

Cornel West is a prominent academic and provocative democratic intellectual, activist, and author. Professor of Philosophy and Christian Practice at Union Theological Seminary, he is emeritus from Princeton University. West has written 20 books on the subjects of race, gender and class in America including the influential Race Matters. Co-host of the popular radio show “Smiley & West” and co-author of a new book titled The Rich and the Rest of Us: A Poverty Manifesto, West keeps alive the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. – a legacy of telling the truth and bearing witness to love and justice.

All attendees must RSVP and bring a photo ID. This event is free and open to the public. Seating is on a first-come, first-seated basis.

Sponsored by the Center for Palestine Studies (CPS) with the generous support of the Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS) and the Anthropology Department, as well as the Middle East Institute (MEI), Heyman Center for the Humanities, Institute for Research on Women and Gender (IRWAG), Center for International History (CIH), Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race (CSER) and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society (ICLS).

With Unesco’s 1949 Human Rights Exhibition as its point of departure, this talk will consider the historical moment of the so-called “human rights revolution” in the late 1940s. Dr. Duranti’s analysis of the forces that first championed human rights invites a reflection on how far this moment should be considered revolutionary in the first place. Instead, Dr. Duranti suggests that the human rights became a means of rearticulating discredited political agendas in postwar Europe, and thus the moment in question may have constituted as much a restoration as a revolution.

This is the opening lecture in a new seminar series revolving around the largely unknown 1949 Unesco Human Rights Exhibition – the first international event that sought to visually represent the history, meaning and content of the rights set out in the UDHR. The series will seek to explore the exhibition’s themes through the research of human rights scholars from various disciplines in an open and interactive setting, leading up to a new display of the exhibition archive at Columbia University’s Buell Hall Gallery in April 2014.

Dr. Marco Duranti received his PhD from Yale University in 2009 and now teaches history at the University of Sydney. He is currently writing a book on the genesis of European human rights law for Oxford University Press.

This seminar series is made possible with the support of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, the Center for International History, and the Center for Human Rights Documentation and Research.

The event is free and open to the public with limited seating offered. Find directions here.